What is it with Ky.? I’m from there and all my relatives are lunatics and criminals.
I had a grandfather that was a train conductor and although I never met him, the storys that people tell indicate that he was nothing to mess with. While he was a conductor on a work-train, he was in the dining car eating breakfast. There were several passengers sitting there as well. Anyway, one of the passengers got done with breakfast, whipped out his false teeth, and licked the gravy off them! {PUKING SMILEY} My grandfather was briefly jailed for chasing the man off the moving train at knife-point while threatening to dismember him.
The same grandfather saw a man whipping a horse pulling a beer wagon on an icy street. The horse was having a tough time and my grandfather jumped on the wagon, took the whip away from the teamster, and flogged him through the streets. He got another short jail term for that.
A great-uncle was very nearly lynched for burning down a church over a property dispute. The next church stayed in one piece but the Great Uncle would make a point of ploughing his property while wearing boots and red long-johns every Sunday morning.
In my dad’s straight laced Dutch Reformed family, not one of the 7 kids did the sex, marriage, kids in the correct order.
In my maternal grandmother’s family (12 siblings), my mom is the only one who has been married to only one person. There are also various stories of incest, half-siblings and secret lovers, but I don’t know the family that well, so I’m unsure of all the details.
The biggest secret is that my mom’s brother was married once before his current wife. He married and then went with the army to Europe and had an affair with another woman. He came home and told his wife that he was leaving her. She died mysteriously a few months later. It was never determined if it was suicide or an accident. I found out about this when I was a teen, and I highly doubt his own kids know anything about it. (Uncle freaked out when my mom told my cousin that she was only a half-sister, so the above secret is probably pretty deeply buried)
My grandfather was a very devout jew, and something of a pillar of his community. He had a lot of honor and more than a little bit of pride in that fact. I always looked up to him.
He was the last of his immediate family to pass on (IIRC), but before one of his brothers died, said brother revealed that our sainted grandfather had been kicked out of hebrew school at a young age. Grandfather refused to comment on it, and was obviously embarrassed by it. So much so that he wouldn’t talk about it for the next decade or so.
As he was comming to the end of his life, one of his children (I honestly don’t remember which one) decided to make some recordings, just asking him questions about his life and his history, so that there’d be a record of things like that. The question came up about the hebrew school, and he hemmed and hawed a lot, and finally gave up the goods.
There was a teacher there who was using pretty harsh corporal punishment. Nothing unexpected from the early quarter of the 20th century, but still… Grandpa and a friend waited outside of the school after a particularly brutal ‘session’ and beat the hell out of the teacher. They were expelled immediately. Grandpa was ashamed over this fact for the rest of his life.
I really like this thread! It’s really interesting to read about everyone’s family secrets.
My family is pretty tame compared to the rest of yours.
I think the only family secret we have is that my grandmother is older than my grandfather. She absolutely refuses to tell us how old she is and her IDs are’t correct because she was born in a remote village and when she moved into the city, all she had to do was give her age by word of mouth to the authorities. She’s so ashamed of her age because it was pretty taboo to marry a younger man in her generation.
Hey! I just realized I’m the lesbian aunt (well, cousin) in my family! Hardly a secret, though…
My mom recently told me that she realized her father most likely inadvertantly killed her mother. My grandmother had heart problems and was not doing well, fairly incapacitated and my grandfather was caring for her. He would have been about 86 then and he never has had a ton of common sense. Anyway, in passing one day he said (proudly), “Oh yes, your mother was taking way too many medications and they were making her worse. So I took her off all of them”. Including her heart medication :eek: . Two weeks later my grandmother had a heart attack and died. He will probably never have a clue.
When I was 18 or 19, my mother, 51 or 52, learned she had a half brother she didn’t know about before. He came to visit; he was only 13. :eek:
I gathered there were probably other undocumented half siblings. It went unspoken, but it seems that my grandpappy was a genuine Depression Era Rambling Man from the foothills of Kentucky who never ever settled down.
